Security researchers at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have discovered a vulnerability they’ve called ‘GhostWrite’ that’s caused by a hardware bug in T-Head’s XuanTie C910 and C920 RISC-V CPUs. Vector extensions that are supposed to provide translation of virtual memory addresses to physical addresses don’t work, meaning that an attacker can gain access to the contents of memory and any attached devices. The bug was found using RISCVuzz ‘Differential Hardware Fuzzing’ tool, which the researchers describe in a paper (pdf). They also discovered ‘Halt and Catch Fire’ bugs in T-Head C906 and C908 CPUs that could be exploited for denial of service attacks.

Continue reading the full story at InfoQ.